Heeey, if you vote for me on Top Web Comics, I put up a panel from tomorrow's page. No spoilers (I think?), but you know, an incentive nonetheless.
I reuploaded this damn page like, four times. Between both monitors, Photoshop, and the Windows preview program thingy, the contrast was totally different, and that last panel has to be like...visible. So hopefully it is now! I made the mistake of having a comic that mostly takes place in the dark. Oops! Daylight and werewolves just don't go well together, I guess. Sort of a shame, because I've really gotten the hang of drawing trees lately, and now you can't see them. (Unless you contribute to my Patreon account and there you can see the inks from this page and all those damn trees in their full glory.)
One of the weirder things about composition that you don't normally have to think about is when people are coming and going. I mentioned this on twitter when I first started drawing out this page, but I realized that I had most of my thumbnail images backwards! When she ran into town, she was facing towards the left. This makes the most visual sense to Western readers who read right to left. Thus, leaving town, she needs to be facing towards the right. That sounds dumb, I know! But to really sell that she's leaving, she has to be facing a different direction. All my film theory classes are way in the past at this point, but I seem to remember that this concept popped up a few times. Anyway, I reversed a few sketches and I think it works really well this way. Also, I'm a big fan of montages! I tend to do more sequences where time is very linear without a lot of skipping around, but I like how easily you can mess with time in comics. Moreso than even film, I think. (Otherwise you couldn't do a complete story in a four panel comic, but you can!)
So this week, I started watching Lost Girl. I think they just put it up on Netflix, or maybe I've just ignored it for awhile. I like it! It seems like Canadian TV has done some good Sci-Fi shows lately, including Continuum, but they kind of peter out in the fourth or fifth season, which is a shame. The acting in Lost Girl can be kind of dodgy sometimes, but I like the dynamic between the two female leads (woo!), and I like that even though the main character is very sexual, her role never seems sleazy or even all that male gazey. It's weird! They manage to take what could be a very awful premise, but by giving her a very well fleshed-out character, her sexuality seems like a natural extension of her character. I actually find it kind of refreshing to have a female character who's just super horny all the time but it's treated in a very natural way. (Well, and spoiler alert, she's a succubus, so that makes sense.) Plus, she's openly bisexual, so that's really awesome. Her scenes with women never feel like "two very straight women playing it up for a male audience", which is my complaint with most lesbian couples on television. You end up with this sort of, constantly hyper feminine, over-the-top sexual thing a lot of times in shows that just feels like some dude's jerk off fantasy rather than an actual lesbian relationship. It's as if some people actually think that lesbians just wander around in teddies and thigh high stockings all the time making weird sexy faces at each other as soon as they come in contact. That...is not reality. So anyway, yes, very much enjoying Lost Girl so far. It's not the best television ever, but it's easy to watch and fun overall.
I will add, so far the show seems to avoid my least favorite TV trope of THE PLAN. Lost Girl sort of plays like a supernatural detective drama, but the action seems like it flows pretty naturally. Even when there's a last minute event that saves the day, nothing feels overly contrived. There's no overly complicated nonsense that's put together at the last minute and pulled off flawlessly. The protagonist fucks up pretty often, but she's resourceful and streetwise, and she punches her way out of a lot of issues if need be. I approve.
Otherwise, I started watching Veep. I like it, but the kind of constant anxiety everyone in the show is under makes it really incompatible with something I can watch a lot of. Also, there seems to be a lot of second-hand embarrassment used as humor, and I can't take that at all. Makes my skin crawl >_